Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia
May 18-21, 2026
Updated February 11: Decisions have been sent.
The program and registration will be posted in February.
Conference Chairs
Chair: Joshua D. Rauh (Stanford Graduate School of Business)
Vice Chair: Stefano Giglio (Yale School of Management)
Associate Chair: Stavros Panageas (UCLA Anderson)
Host’s Faculty Sponsor: Marc Lipson
Keynote Speakers
RAPS & RCFS Keynote: TBA
Cavalcade Keynote: Joshua D. Rauh (Stanford Graduate School of Business)
Awards
Best Paper in Asset Pricing
Best Paper in Corporate Finance
Arthur Warga Award for Best Paper in Fixed Income
PhD Student Grants
Accommodations
For our attendees’ convenience, we have reserved a limited number of rooms at a discounted rate at the hotels listed below:
The Forum Hotel (on the Darden campus, $199/night)
The Draftsman Hotel ($194/night)
The Residence Inn Marriott ($184/night)
Please note that all room blocks expire March 18th, 2026, so we kindly suggest making your reservation promptly.
In addition, Charlottesville offers a wide range of alternative accommodation options to suit different preferences and budgets!
Decisions
We received 1473 submissions. The acceptance rate was 9.8%.
-Conference decisions were sent on February 11, 2026.
-RCFS and RAPS dual submission decisions will be sent separately in the next few weeks.
Registration
-COMING SOON
-All participants must register, including session chairs, discussants, presenters, and attending co-authors.
-Registration fees may be paid via credit card (Visa, Mastercard) or PayPal. If you are paying with a credit card, you do not need to create a PayPal account; simply click past the PayPal Sign In to pay with your card.
-PhD Students and Darden faculty receive registration fee waivers.
-Registration is nonrefundable.
Authors of Accepted Papers
Please log in ConfTool to make updates to your paper. It must be the submitting author logging in to make the updates. The submitting author may upload a new PDF of the paper, update the title and author information, and indicate the presenting author, by clicking Your Submissions –> Final Upload
Presenting
The Cavalcade format is 45 minutes per paper, with 20 minutes for authors, up to 15 minutes for discussants, and 10 minutes for audience and author participation. Session Chairs may adjust this format if needed; please refer to your Session Chair.
Venue Information
Details coming soon.
Submitting Your Paper
-The submission period is closed.
–Call for Papers
-Submission Period: November 7 – December 11, 2025. The system will close at 11:59pm ET on December 11; make sure to begin your submission with time to complete it before the deadline.
-The submitted paper must not be accepted (or conditionally accepted) at a journal.
-Papers that have been presented (or are scheduled to be presented) at the WFA, AFA, and/or SFS Cavalcade Asia-Pacific are allowed.
-Authors of accepted papers are required to attend their session regardless of which day the session is scheduled; if an author can not make it to the scheduled time, the conference reserves the right to pull the paper.
-You do not need to remove author names from the uploaded paper.
-Each paper may only be submitted once. You may not submit the same paper as both a regular submission and a student submission.
Submission Fees
-The submission fee is $75. There are no refunds.
-PhD Student Waiver: For papers in which ALL co-authors are doctoral students, the submission fee is waived. Do not select this option if coauthors on the paper are not PhD students. To receive the waiver, you must select the Student Submission category. Postdocs do not qualify for the PhD Student waiver.
-ConfTool does not save accounts from previous conferences so you will need to make a new account even if you have made an account for a previous Cavalcade.
-ConfTool requires you to pay the fee before you can submit your paper. If you are submitting multiple papers, ConfTool will ask you to pay all the fees at once, then upload each paper individually. Payments may be made via PayPal or credit card (Visa, Mastercard). You do not need a PayPal account; to pay with credit card, simply click past the PayPal log-in prompt.
PhD Students
We especially encourage PhD students to submit to the conference. The SFS will provide up to 8 travel grants to PhD student authors. To qualify, all authors of a paper must be PhD students at the time of the conference. A grant of up to $1,000 will be awarded to the presenting author who travels from North America, or up to $2,000 from overseas.
Dual Submission Option with RAPS and RCFS
You have the option to elect dual submission to either the Review of Corporate Finance Studies or the Review of Asset Pricing Studies. If the journal you select decides not to send your paper out for review, the editor may refer your paper to the other journal, if appropriate, or to the Review of Financial Studies, for possible review. Thus, by selecting the dual submission option, you have implicitly agreed to be reviewed by any of the three SFS journals. Please see our Dual Submission Policy.
About the Cavalcade
The SFS Cavalcade is an annual conference covering all areas of finance. Our goal is to provide a setting that produces the kind of in-depth participation of a smaller conference while accommodating the variety of papers of a larger one. The SFS Cavalcade is a joint project of the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Corporate Finance Studies, and the Review of Asset Pricing Studies.
Contact Us
Contact cavalcadenorthamerica@sfs.org.